1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document management apparatus that search a document group, a system, method and a medium storing a program thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current document management systems often create a document group using a single folder or category, and save multiple documents within that document group. In this case, “document” refers to, for example, conference materials, reports, or the like. Accordingly, document groups are given labels such as “conference materials”, “reports”, and so on, and documents related thereto are registered together.
However, with such a document group, predetermined attributes, such as the name of the document group, are simply registered, and thus detailed attribute settings cannot be carried out for the individual registered documents. As a result, a user cannot efficiently search a document group while taking into consideration the documents registered in that document group. There is thus a heavy burden on a user who wishes to search multiple document groups for a certain related document group.
In order to solve this problem, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-10996 describes a system that predefines the relationships of keywords and extracts keywords with a high rate of appearance from a document. According to this system, multiple documents are classified based on the extracted keywords, and the keywords are set for the classified folders as indexes, which can then be used in searches. Meanwhile, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-72705 describes a system in which keywords with a high rate of appearance in a document registered in a folder are set in the attributes of the folder as specialty keywords. According to this system, it is possible, when performing a search, to automatically narrow down the scope of a search for a folder by inputting the specialty keywords along with the search keywords.
Reusing the documents/information saved in a document group can be given as an example of a reason for a document management system to set index information for document groups. This reuse is targeted at not only the user who registered the document data in the document group, but rather for all users of the system. Here, the document group that includes that document data is a document group that bears significant relevance, in terms of a certain task, for other users who are involved in the same particular task, that belong to the same organization, and have user characteristics similar to the original registrant; it is thus desirable to encourage reuse.
Regarding the classification in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-10996, the classification results do not change from user to user. Instead, a user must input search keywords as per the conventional art when s/he wishes to search for documents related to him/herself. Therefore, a user cannot perform an efficient search unless s/he knows what sort of attributes are set. Meanwhile, regarding Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-72705, it is possible to set a specialty keyword such as “personnel” as the keyword. That specialty keyword may then be updated or new specialty keywords added to the folder based on keywords with a high rate of appearance in the documents included in the folder. However, if specialty keywords are set based on keywords included in documents created by other users, there is no guarantee that keywords consistent among the multiple users will be included in the documents. There is therefore the possibility that specialty keywords using differing notations or that may not be conceivable to other users are set. For this reason, a user cannot find the folder s/he desires unless s/he knows what sort of specialty keywords are set for a folder when inputting a specialty keyword.